On the Transvaluation of Values

Abstract

Nietzsche and Foucault are easily linked. Foucault disconcerts (Taylor 1986, p. 69), Nietzsche confounds, allures and forbids (Heller 1988, p. 17). Both are “prophets of extremity” (Megill 1985), sharing a severe skepticism of knowledge, a radical perspectivism for methodological analysis, and an overarching aestheticism. Each might be read as a “determined joker” (Foot 1991), not literally but ironically, not as guides but as opponents, whose work, like that of an artist, exists “in a state of tension with the given.” (Megill 1985, p. 315) Not only did Foucault himself address his indebtedness to Nietzsche, he has been called “Nietzsche’s closest successor” (Megill 1985, p. 30), based on the comparison both of the manifest product and methodology of their respective critiques; when Foucault summarizes his endeavor to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects (that is to say, the objectivization of the individual and his subjection to control (Foucault 1983a, p. 208)), there is a strong resemblance to Nietzsche’s orientation. But Foucault’s most obvious intersection with Nietzsche concerns genealogical analysis that probes the developmental process by which man has become an “object” — as opposed to his self-asserted “subjectedness.”

I am most appreciative of the critical comments offered by Anne Dubitzky, Margaret Paternek, and Christopher Ricks, and underlying my effort, the general support and encouragement of Bob Cohen, to whose mentorship I am deeply indebted.